OpenActive

OpenActive

Sport England join the community

Sport England and the ODI are joining forces to use data to get more people active by making it easier for them to find and access physical activities. This collaboration forms part of Sport England’s new strategy, Towards an Active Nation, to make physical activity accessible to everyone.

What is OpenActive?

OpenActive is an ambitious, community-led initiative for change across the sport and physical activity sector, which promotes the use of opportunity data to help people get active. It is being coordinated by the Open Data Institute (ODI), an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organisation.

Our goal is to make data on what, where and when physical activity sessions happen, openly available. This “opportunity data” includes details of a yoga class (“how much will it cost?”) through to badminton court availability (“where and when is a court available?”).

We are bringing together sports and physical activity organisations from across the sector to open up their opportunity data, from leisure operators to National Governing Bodies, local sports clubs to event providers, walking groups to fitness instructors. We are also helping other organisations to use this opportunity data to build interesting tools and experiences for consumers.

We are supporting these organisations to:

Open up data – helping them to share and publish data with an open licence.

Innovate with data – helping them to use opportunity data to engage their audience.

Learnabout data – providing ODI-certified training to ensure organisations understand what open data is and how publishing data can benefit them.

Build momentum – spreading the message within the sector, and contributing to supporting materials that anyone can use.

The OpenActive community was started by a group of enthusiastic sports and physical activity organisations who wanted to reach new audiences with better opportunities to get active, using data and smart technology. The ODI is calling on all organisations interested in using opportunity data to get more people active, to join the community.